Exit Strategy
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Master Sergeant Booth reflects on his forty-fourth sniper kill and what he wants to do with his life when he gets out of the Army. A birthday fic for the one and only threesquares.


**Exit Strategy**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Story Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer: **Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

* * *

_**A/N: **__August 17th, 2013 marks my friend and fellow writer _**threesquares**_' __44th birthday. I felt that such an occasion merited a tiny effort on my part to add to her joy. So, while this is not entirely a joyful little story, I hope the birthday girl likes it anyway. (She's a little bit of an angst monkey, so I'm thinking she'll find it acceptable.)_

* * *

**August 17, 1998  
Eastern Atlantic Ocean: 35 miles off the coast of Angola  
**

* * *

Tonight was number forty-four.

Was it worth it? Who the fuck knows. I don't even know anymore.

I'm sitting in the back of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter looking out the window as me and the rest of my chalk flies over the glittering black of the Atlantic Ocean on the way back to the USS Carl Vinson. We're not alone, though. Sitting in that Black Hawk with us is the human cargo we picked up during the mission: four American engineers who were kidnapped and held captive by armed separatists in the backwater town of Buco-Zao in northern Angola. Our job was to rescue them and get them the hell out of Angola.

Mission accomplished.

One of the other guys, First Sergeant Hanson, is sitting next to me with a hole through his arm after taking an AK-47 round to the bicep in the operation. He's going to be okay, and—typical Ranger—he's sitting there with a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his lip as he's holding a blood-soaked bandage (his fourth now, since he went through three others which lie in a crumpled pile on the floor of the helicopter next to his muddy boots). The newly rescued hostages are sitting across from us, their eyes wide and unfocused as they stare back at our sweat-streaked faces which are smeared with mottled patterns of dark green and black camo face paint. They don't know what the fuck just happened to them, or why.

To be honest, I'm not sure I really understand why.

Back in 1991, when I rode into Iraq on a Black Hawk more or less like this with a different group of men, the mission was more obvious. Our job then was to infiltrate Iraqi territory, seize control of Highway 8 and cut off the link between Baghdad and Kuwait so that Coalition forces invading south of us would be able to neutralize Iraqi forces in their sectors without fear of enemy reinforcement. Saddam Hussein was a belligerent who'd attacked another sovereign country without cause or provocation, and our job was to liberate Kuwait. I killed six men in Iraq before I got captured by the Republican Guard.

In 1993, when I rode into Mogadishu on another Black Hawk with a chalk of other guys from Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, our mission was to restore civil order in Somalia by capturing or neutralizing the warlord Mohamed Farrah Hassan Aidid and his lieutenants. We had a mission. It was clear enough, and it made sense to me. I killed seven more in Mogadishu before we pulled out on October 4th.

I killed three in Rwanda in July of 1994.

Four in Guatemala in the fall of 1994.

Another six when I went back to Iraq (or, depending on your point of view, Kurdistan) in February and March of 1995.

Two in Zaire in the fall of 1995.

Three in Brazzaville in the Congo in January this year.

And a whole bunch more in a whole bunch of other places I'm not allowed to talk about, which is just as well because, as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather not think about 'em anyway.

_Fuck._

And tonight was number forty-four.

Forty-_fuckin'-_four...

I'm tired, I'm thirsty and my BDUs are soaked all the way through with sweat and covered with the reddish dust that seemed to be everywhere in that crappy little town we got dropped into where the rebels were holding the hostages.

The sound of the rotors over my head is loud enough that I can't hear myself think, but maybe that's just as well. I don't want to think. If I think, I'll start thinking about why I'm here and, well…

I don't know why the fuck I'm here.

Intellectually, yes, I know why I am here. I enlisted. I signed on to do a job, to serve my country, to be the long arm of its interests abroad and to keep my country free. I'm doing what the men of my family have been doing for generations. My father served his country, as did my grandfather, and my great-grandfather before him, and so on as far back as anyone can remember. I'm a Booth. It's what we do. We serve our country, and so that's what I'm doing. I'm doing what I signed up to do.

_Right?_

But when I risk my neck to rescue a bunch of American hostages who are there in that shitty-ass war-torn corner of a fucking shithole country in the armpit of the world because Chevron wants to keep drilling for oil in northern Angola so people back home can drive Hummers, it doesn't make a lot of fucking sense.

Having been successfully extracted from another mission—with all my body parts intact and no worse for the wear except for a bit of a headache because the heat (even in the middle of goddamn night) was enough to get me dehydrated—I find myself thankful that I made it outta there.

I look over at Hanson. His arm's oozing blood all over the damn place and he's using up bandages like they're going out of style, and as I watch him sitting there, his half-smoked cigarette bobbing between his lips as he's mumbling under his breath some _"goddamn motherfucker"_ something or other, I know there's only so long I can keep doing this before my fucking number's gonna come up. I've seen the guy next to me bite it, more than once. I wasn't thirty-six hours into my first real combat mission when I lost my spotter on a countersniper mission during the 101st's big push into Iraq.

Military planners talk about exit strategies and how no tactical plan is complete without an exit strategy.

You know what?

I need a fucking exit strategy.

I got two more years left in this enlistment and then I'll have ten. Maybe I can do another ten in the Reserves to get my twenty, but I need to find myself a different line of work. One that makes sense.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mind putting my ass on the line for other people. I really don't. But I want it—the putting my ass on the line—to have some purpose and to make sense somehow in the bigger scheme of things. I want to be able to see that what I'm doing makes a difference somehow in the lives of ordinary people, and not just to big fuckin' oil companies that want to pop their straws into somebody else's Capri Sun and suck the juice out of some poor ass country's livelihood. I want to be useful. I want to save lives. I want to be able to go home and know—and I mean really _know_—at the end of the day that the work I do makes the world a little bit of a better place than it was when I woke up that morning.

I think I know what I want to do. I've been thinking about it since the last time I went home on leave to see Pops and Nan, since the night I went out to meet an old buddy from South Philadelphia High School. Jason was late (because he's always fucking late—I swear the fucker's gonna be late to his own funeral) and while I was waiting for him to show up, I started talking to this guy sitting next to me at the bar. The guy knew by my high-and-tight that I was a soldier, and he started chatting me up about what I was going to do when I got out of the Army. I told him I didn't really know, and he told me he was with the FBI.

"The FBI, huh?" I asked him.

Two beers later, my friend finally showed up and I thanked the guy for the info, then Jason and I skidded off to play some pool in the back room.

It's strange, I guess, but it wasn't until tonight that all the pieces came together in my thick skull and the lightbulb went off.

_The FBI._

There's your fuckin' exit strategy, dumbass.

* * *

**A/N:** _So that may be the least birthday-like birthday fic ever written, but knowing _**threesquares** _as I do, I'm hoping (fingers crossed!) that she likes it anyway, even if it's not fluffy or cheery or squooshy or twinkly or, alas, smutty._

_Happy 44th birthday, _**threesquares**! _I hope you like your little present from the monkey._ _(And if not, sorry! Just remember, only 11 more years until another palindrome birthday, pal...)_

_For the rest of you, I hope you liked it, too. But don't leave me in the dark. Please, share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Let me know what you think. Consider leaving a review._

_To all of you: thanks for reading._

**Editorial note:**_ If you've been following Dharmasera's edgy and sexy Angel/Bones crossover, we posted a new story in the "Compendium of Lost Moments" series: "A Midsummer Night's Drive" (set in Chicago in June 1982). It's chapters 8 and 9 of "Compendium of Lost Moments."_


End file.
